By the way:

As some of you may notice, i have a poll on the right side of the page. Basically, I will ask random questions concerning important matters in the world today (unlike the current one). I am asking "Do you shock the monkey" only because Dont know what the act of shocking a monkey is. If any of you people know what shocking the monkey is... please let me know in a comment. you can also email me your opinion at: craiglaughlin at gmail dot com (spelled out for spam purposes).

Facebook Gender

Alas!

Thanks to Dom, I have been alerted about my gender on Facebook. It seems that I am lazy with internet social groups, and I neglected to change my gender to Male, instead of Female. So every time I would change something, it would say "She did this" or "She did that". But we all know that Dominic is truly the girly-man. Sure, he could (at any moment) make a comment about how he is not a girly-man-woman-lady, but I have the upper hand.... I can delete his comments. I win. Anywho, thanks to Dom, I now know what my gender on facebook is.

Final Midterms

/Head Explodes!

A Digital Life with Google

Over the past few months I have been looking at opportunities to making my life easier and taking advantage of a rich digital experience. Being envious of Apple Corp. “.Mac” service, I wanted something similar for the PC, but for free. What I was looking for was something with simple webpage for myself that I could have a blog on, reliable email, an online photo gallery, functionality to do video casts, and have the availability to do online storage.

For a while now I have been using google’s services. I have used Gmail, Google’s free email service since it has been available. They offer 2GB of space, and excellent way to archive emails, and its also very easy to find old email’s with built in search functions. With Gmail, on my own personal laptop, I use Mozilla Thunderbird. I really like to use Thunderbird for its unique junk filtering, and it makes it easy for me to save emails into nice little folders. Plus, I hate web-based email. So I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird, and being that it already had a simple setup for gmail built in, I was already to go.

Google also offers a service called Blogger. It’s very basic, but its all I need. It allows me to blog with very little hassle, and makes it very easy for syndication. They also offer multiple templates with which, you can customize to your own liking.

Picasa is another service offered by google. It sorts all my photos and organizes them for me. I can also quickly export my photo albums to the web, and it also allows me to implement them right into my blog. Its very simple, and organized, and that makes me happy.

With video casting, I just use Google Videos. Being that Youtube.com is now owned by Google, they make it very simple as well to upload my videos, I can also keep videos private, or allow them to be in the public searches.

Another thing I forgot to mention was a function to do Calendars. Guess what, Google offers that too! I can also share my calendar with friends, and even designate certain people to add or change my calendar. With the added functionality of Mozilla Sunbird with the “Provider for Google Calendar” extension, it makes Google calendar a true 100% collaboration tool.

If I also wanted to have group discussions, Google has that as well.

As for the online storage… that was a bit tricky, but I found a way for google to take care of that as well. I originally tried using “Box.net” for my online storage, but they disabled webdav support, and being that I wanted to just drag and drop files to a drive in my drive list, Box.net wasn’t working anymore. I also tried XDrive, which they offered free space, but their desktop software, in my own opinion, was quirky, and didn’t connect all the time. I had heard originally at one time when Gmail first came on to the scene, they were going to offer online storage. So far google has failed to come up with something with their own brand name. I am still trying to get a hold of somebody at Google for an interview to see if and when they are planning to have this online drive going, but I am having very little luck. I did however find a 3^rd party solution allowing me to use Google’s online storage space to hold my files. I did a search for GMailFS which I found a shell extension that would allow a drive to show up in my drive list. A WORD OF WARNING!!! I would setup a second GMail account for this if you are planning on using them for online storage. It has been reported that people have had their accounts suspended for indefinite amounts of time because they have misused their service. So, create a second account similar to the original and you should be safe. I don’t see any problems if you are loading just documents (and other small files) to your Gmail Drive, I wouldn’t use it as a full-blown method to store all your data. Just as a nice backup tool, that’s all.

Well, that’s my little tidbit on how to make your life a little more digital and organized. Thanks to Google.

Congratulations to........ Microsoft?

Yep, that’s right! Microsoft has (un-thought of)taken a step into the open source community and made public.

http://www.microsoft.com/opensource

I’m very excited to see what comes of this. I think Microsoft needs the open source community. If they want reliability, they need a different approach, and open source, in my own opinion is the way to do it.

Anyways, Congratulations Microsoft.

Review of Dell Inspiron 1520

Well, its been about a week since I've had my new Dell Inspiron 1520 Notebook Computers.

Here are the Hardware stats:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.5GHz 667MHz 2MB L2 Cache
Memory: 1GB, DDR2, 667MHz
Hard Drive: 160GB 5400RPM SATA
OS: Microsoft Windows Vista (soon to have ubuntu dual boot)
Network:
Integrated 10/100 Lan
Wireless
Bluetooth
Modem
Optical Media: Dvd +/- RW dual layer drive
Integrated 2M pixel Webcam

Laptop Picture Gallery

So far, i have been really happy. I have used it in several places and I usually have no problems connecting into wireless hotspots. I have come to the realization that I dont like Vista all that much. I need vista though because my professors require me to use certain Items of software, so I am stuck with it for the time being. Its relatively fast for my taste. I just thought i would write this little blurb so y'all can see it. later.

New Laptop

Hello my fellow blog readers.

Well, things have been very busy recently. Classes have been going well at BGSU and wedding plans are coming along just fine.

I have recently purchased a new dell inspiron 1520 notebook for personal and school use. Im pretty happy with it so far, and intend on writing a review on it once I've had more time with it.

I did make a short little webcam clip, that I hope you will enjoy. I was just fooling around with the webcam and windows movie maker.



Anywho, I will have pics up soon, with a review! later all

Run free you little feisty fawn!

Well, it's been a while since ive last blogged, but I wanted to get one up in time for the new site launch.

Ive recently installed ubuntu's new edition of linux dubbed; Feisty Fawn ver. 7.04. I really like it a lot. Plenty of great software, eye-candy, security, and ease of use.

Im still testing a lot of different features. I recently started up an apache web server with apache, with no problems at all. I wanted to mess around with my own web servers because i wanted to do more web development, but without fuss of web host with rules. I can set my own terms.

Im also planning on installing ubuntu feisty on my mythtv unit. I have been using knoppmyth for a while, but i just feel at home with ubuntu. I have a feeling that it will be my main distribution for a long time.

I also installed beryl to give some extra added eye-candy, and I am quite impressed. Once again, Ubuntu has done a fine job as far as incorporating a 3d desktop.

for my web server, as i mentioned that I installed apache, as well as php5, mysql, and im also experimenting with drupal for the web interface. My next project will be to run my own mail server. So ill have to read up on all that jazz, but Im sure Ubuntu will have all the software I need to get started on that project.

well, thats all Im writing for now. thanks for visiting the new site, and keep posted for new and exciting updates! :)